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Sunday, March 09, 2008

Nicole Brenez on Experimental Cinema

Fergus Daly's documentary on avant-garde cinema, Experimental Conversations (2006), prominently features Nicole Brenez. I have transcribed all her comments, and am presenting them below in the order in which they appear in the documentary. Let me add that Brenez's fiery, polemical text is enhanced by seeing/hearing her speak--she is clear and incisive, and her manner patient, assured, even playful. She seems a model of a good teacher; I wish I could attend one of her classes. The above YouTube clip from the movie features her and Philippe Grandrieux. I first learned about Experimental Conversations through Mubarak's post from a few months ago; the post features yet another clip from the video. -- Girish.

An experimental cinema considers cinema not in terms of its uses or conventions but rather its powers.

Experimental cinema involves the entire field of the passions. The so-called standard cinema standardizes the emotions, sensation, perception, and belief. In that cinema you don’t find anything except what you’ve known and felt already. Of course you can love this in the same way you love the same stories, read every evening, read by the same voice, your mother’s. Faced with this considerable restriction of sensible and emotional experience, experimental cinema re-opens the entire field of experience.

An image in avant-garde cinema is something irreducible to one conception. It’s the exploration of all possible conceptions which don’t pre-exist the exploration itself. For example, the industrial cinema falls within Hegel’s formula ‘art is what decorates our internal and external environments’. This ‘impoverished’ conception of art is precisely what the dominant cinema insists on, that it be a psychic and social ornament, what’s called a ‘diversion’, a conception not reprehensible per se but which is a problem because it’s imperialistic because it occupies the entire field of images. Avant-garde cinema explores every other conception of the image.

An oeuvre can be called great if the artist invents his/her own conception of the image according great power, strong symbolic properties, to the image.

Experimental cinema implies the field, the site, of a critical questioning of the world in general, of experience in the political, ethnological, anthropological and metaphysical senses.

Experimental cinema is the field of investigation of the very modalities of our apprehension and in particular modes of vision. The horizon in which this research is inscribed was sketched out by a minor character in Godard’s La Chinoise who posed this very beautiful question: ‘what if reality hasn’t yet been seen by anyone?’

The fundamental problem at stake in experimental cinema and all the practices it implies is to ceaselessly pose the question: What use is it to make an image or not make one? And an inevitable question follows: ‘What is art?’

Experimental cinema stands against the history of dominant images; we can cite Jonas Mekas’ sublime formula: ‘Hollywood cinema is merely a reservoir of material for artists to use later.’ Therefore experimental cinema is a major speculative initiative since its task is also to criticize, change, parody and destroy the dominant images, or to complete them, to reveal what they hide and falsify. This is one of the great undertakings of what’s known as the cinema of ‘found footage’.

What defines experimental cinema, whether it has political, scientific or aesthetic concerns, are a certain number of values: freedom of thought, critical awareness, therefore intellectual, economic, political independence, and an independent mode of existence.

Bresson said it 40 years ago: ‘a great film gives us an elevated notion of cinematography’, an elevated idea of forms is inseparable from the idea that cinema leaves a trace in the world, whether it’s a faithful trace or a contradictory one matters little, it’s a trace which alters our grasp of the world. An example from French cinema is Philippe Grandrieux, who in Sombre and La Vie Nouvelle, works in a significant way with colour and light to a degree that brings him into conflict with his technicians because they’re obliged to make camera movements or lighting set-ups which seem unimaginable to them technically, but which, when realized by Grandrieux, doing his own framing and camera movements, are shown to be extraordinary enrichments of the palette of optical possibilities. They didn’t know what the cinema could do until Grandrieux did it. For example, in terms of texture, he invents new possibilities for haze and blur in Sombre, furthered in La Vie Nouvelle, as well as his work with black in La Vie Nouvelle. It’s one of the greatest films of the present, because it’s about the responsibility of images as images, not bearing themes but as images themselves in a catastrophic world. An image can save the world and not merely diagnose it, you have to see La Vie Nouvelle to appreciate what’s at stake.

In the middle of the 20th century, around 1951, it became clear that the film industry had reduced a potentially limitless apparatus to a single standardized practice and therefore that it was urgent to rediscover other practices, other movements, other logics than that which was producing images for commercial consumption. Therefore for example you see the reintegration of the idea of artisanship in the cinema, bypassing the integrated industrial chain in favor of directly intervening with the hands, the filmmaker’s hands, giving rise to all the practices of painting on film, scratching, direct intervention, etc.

There have been three great decades: the 1890s when all films were beautiful, the 1920s for the unsurpassed invention of montage, the 1970s because of the formal beauty that triumphed.

One of the most precious to me because least recognized paths taken by experimental film is the demand for pure and radical mimesis, descriptive investigation, simple description, the violence of pure analogy, of a pure recording. There are many versions of this, for example the field of scientific film, supreme from a figural viewpoint, Marey’s films, or those of Lucien Bull, continued today by Alexis Martinet, Professor Berthier and many others.

The idea that art will redeem, I find this idea very beautiful, very problematic, you find it in all the sublime thinkers who are references for us on a day-to-day basis, Benjamin, Deleuze, and Godard, who revives them in cinema. Bizarrely, I prefer Adorno’s totally despairing belief [laughs] that art has no mission. Because, for whatever reason that makes us hold on to this idea of mission — it can be a sublime reason like Schiller’s belief that art can, in certain ways, teach us to emancipate ourselves — I prefer to think that an oeuvre doesn’t fix a mission for itself, but that it exists, breaks things open, introduces disorder into what was believed to be an ineluctable political and in particular ideological order, art as catastrophe in fact. [laughs]

* * *

Links:

-- From the archives: I collected several Nicole Brenez links in this post from a year ago. Also, I just noticed that Steven Shaviro twittered: "Nicole Brenez's ABEL FERRARA is the most beautiful book ever written on a single filmmaker. It gives Ferrara the respect & love he deserves." (Steve--I'd love to read a post by you about this book!)

The cultural critic Edward Said, in his writings on “late style,” identified two versions of “artistic lateness.” One produces crowning glories, models of “harmony and resolution” in which a lifetime of knowledge and mastery are serenely evident. The other is an altogether more restless sensibility, the province of artists who go anything but gently into that good night, turning out works of “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction.”

Mr. Oliveira, force of nature that he is, represents both kinds of lateness, often in a single film. In this, as in so many other respects, he is his own special case. What are we to make of an artist who hit his stride in his 70s, and for whom “late style” is in effect the primary style? [...]

“I think of film as a synthesis of all art forms,” Mr. Oliveira wrote. “And I try to balance the four fundamental pillars of film: image, word, sound and music.” [...]

But he would be the first to caution against making too much of his longevity. “Nature is very capricious and gives to some what it takes from others,” he said. “I see myself being more admired for my age than for my films, which, being good or bad, will always be my responsibility. But I am not responsible for my age.”

* * *

A week of criss-crossing travel. I've just arrived in Cocoa Beach, Florida, to present a paper at an engineering systems conference. I'll return home to Buffalo for a day to teach my classes mid-week, then fly down to New York City for the "Responsibilities of Criticism" seminar/conference featuring Nicole Brenez, Adrian Martin and Jonathan Rosenbaum. If I can manage to take some notes, I will try to post them here.

35 Comments:

These insights are truthful and so beautiful. . . I especially appreciate this quote: " . . . it can be a sublime reason like Schiller’s belief that art can, in certain ways, teach us to emancipate ourselves . . ."

How can Brenez define experimental cinema so it doesn't just mean "what I like"? Or does she mean what she says literally: that nothing that comes out of an industrial context can do anything except regurgitate familiar feelings?

Acquarello -- Traveling down here, I sat next to a woman whose son (a veterenarian) was going up on it, and she was flying down here from New England for the event ... I have a large ocean-facing window, so maybe I'll catch a glimpse of it in the sky tonight.

Dan -- I was wondering the same thing, and I don't know the answer. Brenez programs experimental cinema for the Cinematheque, but she has an incredible breadth of viewing and knowledge of 'industrial' cinema as well, e.g. her Abel Ferrara book, all the film references she makes in her Movie Mutations letters, her championing of certain Hollywood films like De Palma's Mission: Impossible, etc.

So, if the statements above imply that "nothing that comes out of an industrial context can do anything except regurgitate familiar feelings," I wonder if it is a highly conscious and consciously extreme polemical stance like that of the Cahiers 'enthusiasts' of the '50s...?

Or perhaps she feels (and I'm just throwing out a guess in the dark here) that experimental cinema is the primal site of exploration of cinema's fundamental powers (like 'pure research & development' would be in a scientific context), while 'industrial' cinema can only make use of and build upon (turn into 'applied' form) these fundamental innovations in image and sound. I'm just speculating here...

I remember P. Adams Sitney disputed in an audio interview (Film Coop) that the word "experimental" suggested that the AG was only a territory of lab experiments made to pave the way for commercial applications.

Harry, I'd agree that to think of avant-garde only in that way is terribly limiting.

Harry, I'm curious: does the Cinematheque show a lot of avant-garde cinema? (Or are there other Paris venues which are more important for experimental cinema?) Have you had a chance to see any programs curated by Brenez?

Acquarello, I stayed up late watching a movie on my laptop (Jonathan Kaplan/Tim Hunter's late-'70s teen movie Over the Edge, which was even better than I remembered it), and slept right through the launch, even though it reportedly lit up the sky for miles around.

...which, when all is said and done, sustains its own singularly unique glow afterall.

Girish, thanks so much for taking the time to transcribe Nicole Brenez's comments. I especially like when she says, "The so-called standard cinema standardizes the emotions, sensation, perception, and belief. In that cinema you don’t find anything except what you’ve known and felt already." Also: "This ‘impoverished’ conception of art is precisely what the dominant cinema insists on, that it be a psychic and social ornament, what’s called a ‘diversion’, a conception not reprehensible per se but which is a problem because it’s imperialistic because it occupies the entire field of images." In many ways this is what Pedro Costa kept complaining about throughout his PFA residency: the films that don't get screened because they don't fit market definitions by adhering to popular aesthetics, rhythms, and usage of image.

Though he is equally quick to assert that his films are not avant-garde. Though, clearly, in his efforts to level the playing field between high and low art (i.e., cinema), he has called for its emancipatory redemption.

Yes there are regular screenings at la Cinémathèque and the Centre Pompidou, and there is a monthly AG ciné-club in a arthouse that I know of. But it's not in my usual radar so I don't actively track these down.I noticed Brenez was giving lectures but I didn't get a chance to attend any yet unfortunately.

Yeah, Costa complained that his films were not screened enough, and deplored that they've become a "cinémathèque niche" for the elite...There is truth to that, but when one makes upstream films that are known not to appeal to the mass, we can't blame the system and bad marketing strategies. A demanding movie is demanding.All we can do is educate the public taste. But given the world we live in now, there is no sizeable audience for Colossal Youth. In France it opened on only 3 small screens for 2 weeks (and is now on one screen once a week). I regret how critics insist on the "boredom" of such film because it's not their job to assume the standard format cinema comes in, but that's how people consider their "cinema" : an entertaining commodity that shall not disappoint.Anyway, commercial cinema (budget, screen circuit, box office, audience, cultural appeal) is a different ballpark. There is no point comparing it to AG, challenging indies or documentaries.

I disagree. We can blame the system and bad marketing strategies. Especially when the elephant is taking up more room than it's due in the orchestra pit. And there is definite merit in comparing (contrasting) commercial cinema to AG, challenging indies and documentaries, if only to secure definitions. If you don't want to, well, fine; that's an elephant of a different color.

As for Costa, when he was complaining about films he's not allowed to see in movie houses, it was not his own films he was talking about but the work of others who he admires. So it wasn't just petulance that his own difficult films aren't marketable; it's that the market refuses to find room for the difficult film and that refusal is fundamentally obscene and should be objected to.

A good case in point here would be the silly fellow who asked him why he didn't show more sexuality in The Vanda Trilogy. Costa admitted he could get mad at such a statement but would refrain. He said he could only imagine what the fellow was thinking of and that it would have nothing to do with what he was creating. I thought that was a good rebuttal. If you want your slice of ghetto life sexy, go look at City of God or City of Men where the physique of the favela is forefront. It's true, as Joni Mitchell sings, that sex sells everything; but, it's likewise true that sex kills. And not only cinema.

girish - I was meant to tell you this a few weeks ago, but it must have slipped my mind. I saw Awara for the first time in more than 20 years last month at an Indian Film Festival here in Istanbul. I am trying to locate a passable copy of the Turkish version to do a few shot-by-shot comparisons, not to mention the similarities between certain musical cues. I will let you know when I'm done (it will be a few weeks - the one copy I have of the Turkish version is a very old recording from the telly).

Maya, this is weird but the first question out the gate after the screening of Vanda's Room in Toronto last summer was also about why Costa didn't show any sex in the film! He was gracious and deflected the question but ... how bizarre.

Ali, I didn't know there was a separate Turkish version of Awaara. The Indian film scholar Gayatri Chatterjee has written a terrific full-length book on the movie; the book even won a Presidential award in India for "best cinema book" of the year. Her BFI Film Classics monograph on Mehboob Khan's Mother India (1957) is also very good. I read it just a few days ago, after revisiting the film.

I know you like to disagree with me for the fun of it, Michael, but my Costa word was taken from a French interview (France Culture), I would send you the mp3 but I don't have your email. He even said that he couldn't be bothered (amicaly) worrying about the underexposition of Straubs films because his own films were in such a dire situation before all. And the anti-normative stance was from Durgnat and Rosenbaum.

As ever, Girish, thanks for the link. Always appreciated. Safe journey home and I wish I could attend the "Responsibilities of Criticism" seminar with you (though the very title makes my spraycan finger quiver).

Listening to the Hoberman interview makes me even more excited that he's attending the San Francisco International this year to present City of Sylvia. Hopefully, I can score an interview with him.

Likewise Michael, your last two posts on Casa de lava and Tarrafal are great critical overviews of the critics reception. When can we read your interview?

As for this "Responsabilities of criticism" summit, let's remember the insightful article Adrian wrote for cinemascope.it (in issue #7) last year.I hope someone is going to record and report on this conference for us who can't attend.

"If it isn’t, in other words, a furtherance of the plot, of the love affair, of the story that the prose movie is telling, then it’s open to all these other possibilities. In fact it almost inevitably starts becoming these other possibilities. They become probabilities, they become absolutes, and one moves with every single picture. When you see a picture it doesn’t just knock the story along, it takes all your own personal relationships to the flower, but not just the flower as a piece of language, but the shape of the flower. That it’s so many-petaled, that its petals are all interwoven with each other in a certain way, that does open up into the rosace, into the rose windows of the great cathedrals; the mystique of the rose is already there in the shape. As a shape it exists and it moves as a shape along the line of our feeling and thinking and thus becomes a film as it’s moving."-- Stan Brakhage

Brian, thanks for the tip. I'm reminded that a few years ago, I took a road trip to go see Jennifer Reeves' The Time We Killed, which featured the poet Lisa Jarnot. I drew a doodle of Lisa J. and sent it to her, only to discover that she was from around here (Buffalo). She has a cool blog.

Maya, I think the spray can is probably built into the event! i.e. I suspect it will also definitely feature critique of the field. Harry linked to Adrian's piece on "responsibilities of criticism"; here's the discussion we had about it here.

Another link: Acquarello's new post is a review of the book Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Paul Willemen and Jim Pines. I've been meaning to check this out, so I'm glad to read A.'s review.

Well, a rude awakening back in snowy Buffalo: I got stuck in my driveway this morning and had to fetch pails of warm water to pour around the car wheels to free myself from the tall snowbanks. Jeez, you'd think I'd have figured out how to maneuver my car in snow by now.

Frantic day: teach non-stop, then run to the airport. Assuming I can poach off someone's free wi-fi in Brooklyn, I'll try too check in here. Have a good week+weekend, everyone.

I really like this sentence by Brenez: “I prefer Adorno’s totally despairing belief [laughs] that art has no mission.”

I have no knowledge about Adorno, but I found some information about him in Wikipedia, which I think is interesting:

“Adorno perceived "kitsch" in terms of what he called the “culture industry,” where the art is controlled and formulated by the needs of the market and given to a passive population which accepts it—what is marketed is art that is non-challenging and formally incoherent, but which serves its purpose of giving the audience leisure and something to watch. It helps serve the oppression of the population by capitalism by distracting them from their alienation. Contrarily, art for Adorno is supposed to be subjective, challenging, and oriented against the oppressiveness of the power structure. He claimed that kitsch is parody of catharsis, and a parody of aesthetic experience.”

Brenez: "The so-called standard cinema standardizes the emotions, sensation, perception, and belief. In that cinema you don’t find anything except what you’ve known and felt already."Is this really true, about commercial narrative films such as "Stromboli", "Ugetsu", "Playtime" "Sherlock Jr.", "Citizen Kane"?

Brenez: "Experimental cinema implies the field, the site, of a critical questioning of the world in general, of experience in the political, ethnological, anthropological and metaphysical senses."Please take some very good experimental films like "Allures" (Jordan Belson) or "Water for Maya" (Stan Brakhage). What do these films have to do with the "political, ethnological, anthropological"? Nothing!

Very little in these comments gibes with experience of actual commercial narrative or experimental films.And why is Bresson being quoted in a discussion of experimental cinema? Bresson spent his entire career on commercial narrative films made and distributed within the French film industry. He's not what is usually thought of as an "experimental filmmaker".

I agree. There seems to be a confusion (in the language) between different couples : AG/conventional (technical/narrative distinction) and great art/commercial standard (qualitative level). Apparently everything that isn't Hollywood stricto-sensus becomes automatically AG...What is Hoberman (in the link above) saying when he cites I’m Not There; Southland Tales; Day Night Day Night; Offside; Redacted as "quasi-commercial indies filled with avant-gardist ideas"? If anything these are original commercial (mainstream narrative) films, as every commercial film should be. But there is no experimental invention in there.Grandrieux isn't experimental either. The only original thing is his cinematography work, so it's a conventional narrative (albeit minimalist and elliptical, "contemplative" I would say) with really creative photo. When I think of AG, it's truly imaginative formal experiments without conventional storytelling (Surrealists, Dadaists, Structuralists, Situationists, Conceptual art...)If the film builds a plot, introduces a protagonist, dramatises an opening and closing act there is no reason why it should not be conventional narrative cinema.

Honestly, Harry, you shouldn't lean so much on diagonal slashes. They're liable to snap out from under you like the thin sticks they reall are. All these either/or dependencies do not further understanding; they further argument, nothing more.

And yes, I think there are identifiable emotions in all those films you've listed, Mike, that are meant to be ready-made emotions the audience can identify and feel comfortable with, and by which they can angle their understanding. And, of course, there's nothing wrong with that if that's the kind of film you want to see or (more to the point) think is narrative cinema. Basically she's saying in that statement what Harry concludes in his: ready forms of narrative accessibility dilute the thrust of experimental cinema.

You might be interested in a piece I wrote on Experimental Conversations for an annual review of Irish cinema. You can read it here. It's a really unique film to have come out of Ireland. Fergus is one of our best critics too.

What are "diagonal slashes"?This was an honest question though... who decides what film is "Avant Garde" if there aren't any obvious characteristics everyone could notice? B-movies, Hollywood movies, flops become AG just because someone is tripping over it, for other reasons than the ones it was made for...Does that mean Wong Kar Wai movies are AG because Chris Doyle is pushing his camera to the limits?

Though I prefer to think of them as the raftsman's "oar" that maneuvers passengers back and forth across a river.

My issue with either/or thinking is that it frequently unnecessarily bisects what would ordinarily be organic and whole.

A piece of film doesn't need to be either avante-garde or not in order for it to contain elements of the avante-garde. A filmmaker should be allowed to move around the many rooms of a creative mansion without being consigned to one room.